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Books About Racism Aren’t New. Read the 1965 Powerful Novel, The Keepers of the House
Shirley Ann Grau’s Pulitzer-Prize Winner
In the last several years, amidst racially-charged incidents, book industry experts talked about the increase in books about racism. The New York Times noted that during one period of 2020, books about racism and race dominated the bestseller lists of both Amazon and Barnes & Noble, offering titles like So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo. White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, and How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi.
Kwame Spearman, who is the chief executive of The Tattered Cover, a retailer bookstore in the Denver area with multiple locations, says the new proliferation of books about race and racism is “a tsunami.”
Publishers are finally buying books from people of color, and people are clamoring to read them, and that’s fantastic news.
But it’s important to note that books about race and racism are not a new phenomena. They’ve been around for decades.
Case in point:
Shirley Ann Grau’s The Keepers of the House, the Pulitzer Prize-Winner in fiction for 1965.
